Stitching
programs vary wildly in their usability and quality of finished
image.

I prefer the one Canon gives away for free with every digital camera, even their cheapest. I have an entire article with examples at Canon Panoramic Software.

Most
other software is impossible to figure out, while others slop together images
without predistorting or mating them properly. If you use a program
that works well and is easy to use I'd stick with it!

Software
that gets these two things right solves 90% of the problem.
If your stitching software is easy to use and gives good results
then you're doing great. I wouldn't spend too much time looking
for something better. If you are looking, here goes...

BASICS

You can't
simply "stitch" together images. Each image has to be predistorted
by the software so that continuous straight lines don't become
kinked when images are assembled.

The
software needs to know how much angle the shots include so it can
do this distortion correctly. Programs usually read the info from
digital camera EXIF, or have this entered manually for film scans.

Unfortunately
many panoramic utilities simply stitch together images without
predistorting (bending) them first. This gives awful results,
since straight horizontal lines become one long line with kinks.
I hope it's gotten better, but the last time I used Photoshop's
Photo Merge this was all it did.

Good
stitching software has to distort each of your images so that they
become one, smooth, fluid, curving panorama when joined.

The
Final 10%

Software
also needs to be able to equalize the brightness from each image,
so you see no "tan lines" when assembled.

It
also needs to align everything precisely as well as mush things
around to help alignment. It helps if your images were shot precisely,
but I get OK results even blasting away a series hand held.

The
best panoramic creation software I've ever used is the free PhotoStitch
3.1 software Canon has been giving away with their digital
cameras for years. I got a copy in 2003 with my Canon
A70, and
you also get it when you buy a new 5D.
It is smart enough to read the flags from your digital camera images
so it knows exactly how much curvature to apply to each image before
assembling them together.

It
even works for images from other brands of cameras and film scans.
You have to tell it the focal length of your
lens for the best results from film since it can't know otherwise.

It
also has many output options: long and skinny still images and
a couple of kinds of QTVR Quicktime VR .MOV files.
There used to be people who charged high-end realtors a lot of
money to do this with special gear and today anyone with probably
any Canon camera can do it easily. Many
Canon cameras include a special stitch assist mode to make it even
easier to make perfect shots for stitching. I do this from
hand held images and it works great.

See some examples here.
I made the shots hand-held and stitched them into long skinny images
and QTVRs later.

If
you don't have this software probably the best way to get it is
to buy the cheapest Canon digital that includes it.

RealViz
Stitcher 5 is
an excellent professional program that costs a few hundred dollars.
It looks incredible when I've seen it demoed by people who know how
to use it. When I tried Stitcher 4 I didn't get very far. It was
easy enough to use at first, but I didn't know the tricks to get it
to make great composites. It also needed images of identical dimensions,
which means it barfed when I imported film scans of slightly different
dimensions.

It's
clearly the program I'd try to learn when I have the time to apply
myself to this. If you just want fast results this probably isn't
for you. If you do panoramas very seriously I'd suggest it first. It
is a professional program intended for folks more competent than
I.

This
is a free program invented by a math professor. It's the gold standard
in processing panoramic images, as well as converting among various
coordinate schemes, correcting lens geometric and chromatic
distortions and image resizing.

It
can do amazing things, but you have to be a math professor to understand
it. Others have written more software to allow normal
people to use Panorama Tools easily. This software is called
Front Ends or GUIs, Graphical User Interfaces.

These
GUIs translate between the math-professor
language of Panorama Tools and English. The last time I used Panorama
Tools I had to enter every coefficient manually, and of course
that's after I manually calculated the coefficients to use!

I
have never used any if these GUIs. There have all been suggested
to me by people who use them: PTAssembler, PTGUI,
and PTMac.
I'd try PTGUI first.
Two people have specifically suggested it.

hugin is
another Panorama Tools GUI that's free and
runs on Mac OSX, Linux, GNU and even windows. It
also runs in Russian, French, Polish, Japanese, German, Chinese,
Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

Wiindows-Only
Programs

The
following programs won't even run on Mac so I haven't tried them.
They only run on Windows. You should
know I prefer Mac as a full-time professional,
if not, I suggest for $500 you upgrade to Mac and learn why we
prefer it. If you're interested you can read Why
Professionals Prefer Mac.

PT
Assembler integrates two free plugins to allow easy
use of the industry standard Panorama Tools. It's writen by Max
Lyons whom I've met and whose panoramic and stitching work
is astounding. The two plugins are Autopano which automatically
selects matching points for stitching and Enblend which automatically
blends the images together after Panorama Tools modifies them.
Drag your images into PT Assembler, hit Auto Create and wait a
minute for a unblended reduced size preview image and then wait
2 - 4 minutes for a full size stitched and blended TIFF.

This
won't run at all on Mac. If you had sound you'd hear me giggling
wondering why anyone would consider graphics software from Microsoft.
It's like hiring an engineering Ph.D. to decorate your house:
he might be really good and do a spectacular job, but prior experience
with engineers tends to suggest otherwise. Microsoft calls it a "professional
graphic design product,"
but since as far as I know most professional designers prefer Mac
I have my doubts. Did you know that Mac is so prevalent in professional
graphics that Microsoft's Annual report is, or at least was, done
on Mac in previous years? I read that in one of Robin Willam's great
Mac design books.

Giving
Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, there is
a free beta, code named "Acrylic," at that link for you
to try. Forget me, for all I know it may be magnificent. It was
suggested by someone at Microsoft as having nice panorama tools.
I'm unsure if that means general tools for panoramic use, or a
GUI for the popular software called Panorama Tools.

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